squatters

When the woman who calls herself Queen Omega moved into a three-bedroom house here last December, she introduced herself to the neighbors, signed contracts for electricity and water and ordered an Internet connection.

What she did not tell anyone was that she had no legal right to be in the home.

Ms. Omega, 48, is one of the beneficiaries of the foreclosure crisis. Through a small advocacy group of local volunteers called Take Back the Land, she moved from a friend’s couch into a newly empty house that sold just a few years ago for more than $400,000.

Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said about a dozen advocacy groups around the country were actively moving homeless people into vacant homes — some working in secret, others, like Take Back the Land, operating openly.

The entitlement mentality is further enabled by morally misguided groups that confuse legitimate civil rights concerns with outright theft:

In addition to squatting, some advocacy groups have organized civil disobedience actions in which borrowers or renters refuse to leave homes after foreclosure.

I have some empathy for those who find themselves in a situation where they are forced from their homes because they can’t afford to pay what they agreed to pay (and I’m especially sympathetic to those who have children). But I cannot condone activities which assume a “right” to something they don’t own. And I certainly don’t define actions to secure what isn’t rightfully theirs as “civil disobedience”.

It’s theft. Property rights are a fundamental building block of a free society. Allow the subversion of those rights and the society won’t be free for long.

And groups and “community organizers” that encourage such subversion or enable the thieves are accessories to theft and should be treated as such.